The annual Git Merge conference just wrapped up,
and it was another exciting year. As always, the speakers were excellent,
the training was informative, and the after-party was a blast. But my
favorite part was a part of Git Merge that most people don't see: the Git
Contributor Summit.

The Git Contributor Summit is held in conjunction with Git Merge, and it
allows the people who work on the git project,
and related projects like libgit2 and
jgit, to get together and talk shop.

The most important part of the Git Contributor Summit, I think, is the
face-to-face time that it enables. This is a rare pleasure for most of
us; the git contributors tend to chat on the mailing list, the libgit2
contributors talk in GitHub issues or in our Slack room, and the jgit
contributors… well, I don't contribute to jgit, but I assume they
have all the same problems that the rest of us do where we start to
lack the personal touch.

And the personal touch is critical. When I first started working on the
libgit2 project, I suggested bringing in some dependency on another
project… and the maintainer wasn't enthused by this idea. In fact,
he hated it. He hated the idea so much that he threatened to fly to the
United States and murder my family if I actually merged that change.

Needless to say: we didn't really get off on the right foot.

But not too long after that, we met at a Contributor Summit and I discovered
that he's actually a lovely, friendly person… he just happens to have a
bit of an odd sense of humor. And so I knew that the next time he threatened
to murder my family that he was just kidding.

Of course, it's not all just social time.
Jeff King is part of the team of three maintainers
who see to the actual business of the git project and he kicks off the
contributor summit with that business. He catches us up on the health of the
project as an entity and its budgetary and legal concerns.

But primarily we talk about the technical issues around git: the problems we
have, and how we intend to fix them. Often these are discussions about
scaling git in
various directions, but we also talk about
making git easier to use and, perhaps more importantly, easier to contribute
to.

The amazing part about this is that we do this working together, despite
having different interests and different needs. There are employees from git
hosting companies, hackers who work on git in their spare time, and people who
maintain git in their organization, whether that's a school, a small website or
one of the world's largest news organizations.

And the hosting companies like GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian, and Microsoft all
sit down together to talk about the problems they have in common and the ways
they've each solved them, and they do it politely and without a hint of
competition. There's no bragging about success or laughing at failures, just
working together for the benefit of all our users.

It's an honor to be able to sit down with all the Git Contributors and
work together on these solutions, and something I look forward to every
year. Thanks so much to the organizers of Git Merge, and to the
organizers and attendees of the Git Contributor Summit, for making it happen.